Day 3 of My Portrait Challenge and Pointers of a Good Portrait Photography

Yes! For the Day 3, my models are cute children! I captured these photos during our company’s Trick or Treat last year. There are loads of pictures but these are my favorites.
Title: Cute Kids in Costumes
Model: Officemate’s kids
Camera:Fuji-XA3 with Fujinon 56mm F1.2 lens
Edit: Some SOOC, some with minor Lightroom adjustments to correct skin tone.

Special thanks to G2photography Photobooth, Photoman and Photo Coverage for lending me the 56mm F1.2 prime lens. It was easy to isolate the subject from the background using this lens. Truly good for events and portraits. I could not afford this kind of lens so it was a great experience to feel how it feels like to use this.

Cute Hermione

Moana (I think?)

An Angel

I’m not sure …

Princess Sophia?

Baby Shark

Thor

Little Red Riding Hood. I applied a preset on this one. I want to make it slightly dramatic. Like she’s looking for someone, a fox maybe.

And my most favorite kid that day, Chuckie! I picked him because he’s much into his character. He was running around , hiding and taunting passerby for reals. I almost had a heart attack when he surprised me. Just look at his eyes. He’s enjoying being photographed.

So while I’m this challenge, I had some readings more like a review with regards on what it makes a good portraiture photography. I’ll make this notes super super short.

Portrait Photography is capturing an image of a person base on the personality he wanted to convey

These are the signs of a good portraiture photography.

Subject’s confidence in front of the camera. To connect to the subject is the first job of a photographer and is very important. When the subject is at ease in front of the camera and the photography process, he could effectively exude the aura and do all the poses required. This all boils down with photographer’s communication skills. A good photographer could make the most camera shy person to feel confident in front of the camera.

Clarity of the eyes. As the old saying says, it’s the window of the soul. If the eyes is not clear in the portraits, the whole image suffers.

Correct skin tone or in technical terms, the right “White Balance”. Most portrait photography should show skin color as close to the subject’s actual skin color . It could be an exception if there is an unusual theme in mind. If there’s an occasion that skin color can’t be matched, the technique is to make it black and white.

Of course there are other rules but these three are the most usual key points I see in any article. In my experience, number 3 is the hardest one. First, you can’t control the lighting condition in most cases specially if its outdoor or an event. And I also have the weakness to over edit pictures. For some reason, warm skin tones looks pleasing to my eyes. A habit that I am still learning to supress! haha! Anyway I have learned something in lightroom to correct the skin tone. To help you visualize, here’s one of the pic above that I edited.

Unedited. Warm skin color. Kinda yellowish because of the lighting

Edited. Slightly corrected the skin by Lightroom.

Did the picture improved from the previous one? What do you think my dear readers?

If you think so, I’ll say how I corrected this thru Lightroom. ( Actually there’s a bunch of it in youtube.)

4 thoughts on “Day 3 of My Portrait Challenge and Pointers of a Good Portrait Photography”

Oh my gosh! They’re all so cute! But yes. I can totally tell Chuckie was the most in character haha. I love the way you edited Little Red Riding Hood! & the lightroom correction/edit you did to the shark is so good.

Who is Gurezu?

I’m another Philippines-based Amateur Photographer at the block. I’m an IT professional by day and an aspiring writer 24 hours. Through this photoblog, I want to give encouragement to single women in their 30’s like me to believe that this could be the most groundbreaking decade of our lives.